• by David L. Smith , February 10, 2003

My respected colleague Erwin Ephron published an article last week on his site titled The Babel Problem. Read this article. It, and many other articles that are published on his site are valuable big picture pieces for the advertising industry. This article talked about the standard of television terminology and why other media should not use this terminology as a default. He goes on to say that each medium should choose the metrics that mean the most to it.

As I got deeper into the article, I realized that I agreed completely with Mr. Ephron, yet I felt there was more. In a way, I disagree with him at the same time that I agree. In a form much less elegant than the writing of Mr. Ephron, I would like to state my response. It should be noted that, because I believe in an all-media solution and am a student of the Internet, my response is skewed to that perspective. That of Interactive within an all-media solution.

I agree that each medium has its own language or tongue. However, the Internet currency is no more a pageview than TV currency is a household rating. It is an “impression” or “ad view.” Minor point, you say. Which it is in a world where people understand the difference. In the Internet, because of all of the relatively new people in our industry, language is not always fully understood or agreed to so we need standardized language.

Take the term reach. For seven years, the Internet has used the term reach to mean what those in other media would call cume potential. This use of the term “reach” was viewed by the early Internet metrics companies as an original and creative use of terminology. It is viewed by those trying to standardize things as a gross misuse of the language we use. As we are all trying to grasp, the “reach” of an Internet campaign is nowhere close to the “reach/cume potential” of the site or medium. This is the only medium where this is generally the case (so far), so attention and care must be used in borrowing traditional media terms and morphing their meaning into something else. For this reason alone, to clarify what Internet reach is, the Internet needs Reach and Frequency metrics.

But there are more reasons to standardize Internet Reach and Frequency.

The first is market driven. Advertiser, agencies and publishers (as a result of advertiser and agency demand) have been searching for verification of the online medium as a branding medium. And they have found it. Now, it is easy to say that if you are looking for something specific or to prove a point, you can find data to support it. All too true. But the evidence keeps pouring in relative to the efficacy of the online medium to produce incremental awareness gains more efficiently than other media in the mix. And the reality is, in this Post-MTV/depressed-market/Ineeditallnow/quickimpression media world, companies are looking for solutions that can raise awareness quickly and affordably. I recognize that awareness is only one component of branding, but it seems to be a huge focus today. So the demand is there.

In this search for verification of the online medium as a branding medium, reach and frequency is a major element in both the planning of weight levels and the verification that delivery of those planned weight levels were executed properly. In addition, Internet reach and frequency metrics can provide answers to a number of other benefits including allocation by medium, incremental reach provided for a demographic segment, etc., and site selection.

And, many other issues.

Yes, we need to recognize the Internet for what it is and what it is not. But to settle back to the assumption that the Internet is only a response medium does not reflect the learning that has happened of recent. The fact is that it is a quick cume medium where people actively (lean forward mode) go to, to look for information and often get messages within the medium through sight, sound and motion. Sounds like another effective medium called TV.

But wait, there’s more!

What if I could give you efficiency, responsiveness, sales now and branding which helps to seed future sales? All in the same message!

There is another point that I agree with Mr. Ephron on. Success ought to be based on sales. But I think that it cannot be just sales today or tomorrow. In time, we will need tools that calculate the lifetime value of a media impression by medium so that all media outside of TV are not evaluated simply on their DR value.

Read his whole article and let me know what you think.

David L. Smith is President and CEO of Mediasmith, Inc.